The Design Companion for Planning and Placemaking

15Tall buildings

Planning can get very involved with defining ‘tall’ in terms of absolute height, number of floors, size relative to surrounding buildings, and so on. However, care should be taken not to become obsessed by height and forget about everything else. Generally planners want to understand and manage the impact of development, and they expect taller buildings to have a more intense and geographically wider impact than smaller buildings. This is why they set height or size thresholds, allowing certain policy requirements or assessments to kick in, and these help planners to manage the impact of tall buildings.

We can justify dealing with the design of tall buildings differently, and having separate policies for them, for the following ...